Essays

Last month, instead of writing one of my usual little meant-to-be-humorous pieces with which I have enjoyed afflicting you over the years, I instead plunged recklessly into autobiography for the text of the June newsletter. I told you about my first job when I was 13, a stirring account of my tenure with the Koontz Kleaning Kompany and the near mass deaths by high-pressure steam that brought an end to that enterprise. The saga continues.

Five years later, following other catastrophes, my dad started another business—Red Dog Bait—that was less physically dangerous but no less humiliating for a teenage boy who yearned for a normal family life and for a less flamboyantly deranged father. Dad was a fisherman. Sometimes when he was gone for a weekend with all his rods and reels, he was actually with another woman, but more often than not he was lakeside or by a stream, angling for bass or trout. On one of these expeditions, he encountered another fisherman, a stranger, who was having great luck with an exotic bait that he made himself. The fat nightcrawlers and the minnows on my father’s hooks were regarded with contempt by the fish, but they took the homemade bait—which the stranger called “red dog”—with enthusiasm. Because he had unshakable faith that he would become a millionaire one day when he found the right business plan, Dad knew, knew as surely as geese know winter’s end has arrived and the time has come to fly north, that this bait called red dog would bring him fortune and glory.

Watching the stranger score fish after fish was, Dad said, “Like being clubbed with a crowbar, and all your brain lights coming on.”

Indeed, he proceeded precisely as might a man hit repeatedly on the head with a crowbar. He bought the formula for Red Dog from the stranger and secured the exclusive right to manufacture and sell the bait. He rented a small store, formerly a corner grocery, along Route 220, toward the north end of Bedford, Pennsylvania, where we lived. In the back room, he cooked batches of Red Dog.

Later, we would learn that he had financed this enterprise by forging my mother’s name to documents and taking out a $5,000-dollar mortgage on our cramped four-room house (less than 600 square feet), which she had worked hard for years to pay off and which would never be paid off again until she died and left $5,000 in life insurance.

The headquarters for the company and its sole retail outlet was a minimalist operation. A big sign over the door proclaimed in green letters on a white background: RED DOG BAIT. Inside, the walls were lined with shelves on which stood row after row of six-ounce jars of bait. On the counter toward the back were an adding machine and a cash box. Behind the counter stood a stool. On the stool sat my father, waiting to get rich, often with a can of beer in his hand.

Soon after Red Dog Bait opened for business, I came home from college for a weekend. Because Dad needed to run off to a mysterious meeting, I was dragooned into watching the store for a few hours. Somehow, I had neglected to bring a book with me. To pass the time, I imagined what customers might say when they came through the door and how I might best reply to them in order to sell the most bait.

One of them might say, “Got any Red Dog bait?” In which case I would reply, “In fact, sir, that’s all we have.”

If the customer asked where we kept the Red Dog bait, I would with a dramatic sweep of an arm indicate the entire store and say, “Everywhere!”

One of them might want to make a large purchase, whereupon I would have to disappoint him. “I’m sorry, sir, but we only have eleven hundred and thirty-eight jars.”

If someone asked if the bait worked, I planned to declare, “Well, if a person opened a store selling only one item and if the item didn’t work as claimed, I’d say he must’ve been hit on the head with a crowbar.”

A customer might want to know of what the bait was made, in which case I would politely explain that the recipe was a trade secret. Should he persist, I would soundly thrash him with a broom and otherwise treat him as the unscrupulous corporate spy that he must be.

In fact, Dad never shared the recipe with me, perhaps suspecting that I would drop out of college and open my own one-bait-is-all-we-have shop in competition with him. The stuff looked like two-inch-long half-inch-wide strips of jellied eel flesh made bright with red food coloring. I do not know if it contained flesh of any marine animal, but I can report with relief that it was not made from dog parts.

“Why is it called Red Dog?” I had asked him.

“That’s what the inventor called it.”

“It’s not made from dogs, is it?”

“No, hell, no. Why would fish want to eat dog meat?”

“They might if they were piranha.”

“Nobody in Pennsylvania goes fishing for piranha. You don’t know enough about fishing to fill a hat.”

I had gone fishing with him only once over the years, when I was nine. We set out on a Friday evening with his friend Bill, and we made camp lakeside, on a gentle slope, where bats swooped low overhead, eating the mosquitoes that were eating us in spite of the sticky and noxious-smelling insect repellent with which we sprayed ourselves.

In the darkness of the nearby woods, unseen owls hooted, and through the nearer tall grass, unknown creatures of disturbing size seemed to be stalking us.

Bill said, “Don’t worry, Butch, they ain’t nothing dangerous.”

In those days, people called me Butch and got away with it. These days, when people insist on calling me Butch, I maim them.

“Nothing dangerous around here,” Bill said, “’cept snakes.”

Until he mentioned them, I had not thought of snakes. From then on, I could think of little else.

In truth, the animals in the grass, the bats, the mosquitoes, the possibility of snakes—none of that worried me as much as Bill worried me. I do believe he was not a dangerous man, but he could have stepped out of a movie about people who wore leather masks and were armed with chain saws. He was as pale as the grubs he sometimes used as bait. His left eye appeared to be perpetually studying his left ear. His teeth were yellow and they clicked whether he wore them or carried them in his pocket. His exceptionally long-fingered hands made me think of spiders because they crawled over his thighs and nearby surfaces when he was otherwise still, as if they had a will independent of his. His speech impediment, which reminded me of the voice of the Disney character Goofy, gave him some charm except when he drank too much, whereupon he sounded like a sinister Goofy. Because he and my father got together as much to drink as to fish, he sounded sinister most of the time, as if Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck ought to organize an intervention by an exorcist.

We arrived at the lake an hour before sundown, and by ten o’clock, I wanted to be taken home. Three times, I cast my line into an overhanging tree, forcing my father to cut it and re-rig the rod for me. I dropped a flashlight in the lake. Dad preferred to use two rods simultaneously, each propped in the crotch of a Y support, and I fell over one. Twice. I misjudged the width of the campfire, tried to jump across it, instead stepped in it, and briefly set one of my shoes on fire. Although I wanted to be taken home, none of the mayhem I committed was intentional. Any time I have ventured into the wilds, whether when I was nine years old or many years later, Mother Nature has cringed with apprehension.

By eleven o’clock, before he could drink enough beer to be a menace on the highway, my exasperated father took me home and then returned to the lake, where spider-hand Bill held down the camp and communed with snakes in his sinister Goofy voice. Dad never took me fishing again, which is one more proof, if I needed any, that God exists.

Nine years after my one night as an angler, I continued to press my father for the origins and composition of Red Dog bait. “Why isn’t it called Red Cat or Red Horse?”

“Because it’s not made from cats or horses.”

“But you said it’s not made from dogs, either.”

“How in hell would I cut up a horse in the back room here, it’s so small?”

“You could have cut up the horse somewhere else, brought it here in pieces.”

“No fish in its right mind would eat a horse. What’s wrong with you, going on about a damn horse? Sometimes, I think college is just making a knucklehead out of you.”

Thirty days after opening its doors, Red Dog Bait closed forever. Of the eleven hundred and thirty-eight jars, twenty-eight were sold. This seems to disprove P. T. Barnum’s contention that a sucker is born every minute, although it supports the contention that one is born nearly every day.

So here we are, sixty-two years later. Instead of spending most of my life hoping to sell bait, I’ve spent it hoping to sell books. My most recent novel, Going Home in the Dark, is now available in a beautifully made hardcover edition with some cool illustrations and other neat features (see below), also in eBook and in a brilliantly narrated audio edition. Since I’m not a hard-sell kind of guy, I’ll only say—you could do worse. Maybe a lot worse.